Gallery Hours:
Wednesdays + Fridays: 11 am - 6 pm
Thursdays: 11 am - 8 pm
Saturdays + Sundays: 12 pm - 5 pm

Building Cultural Legacies
November 23, 2019 - May 18, 2020

Climbing the Cold White Peaks (published in 1986) chronicled the city's art history from 1871-1950, and was a significant enough achievement to warrant a sequel. Presented by the Hamilton Arts Council and funded through the Ontario Trillium Foundation; Building Cultural Legacies is a digital storytelling platform that aims to build knowledge, spark creativity and deepen connection by engaging citizens and visual artists from diverse communities and generations in the sharing of stories about the history of visual arts in Hamilton between 1950 and 2000.

In this exhibition, Hamilton's rich art history is told through archival materials, collection works, short films, a gallery wide scavenger hunt, and the interactive BCL

Women's Art Association 124th Juried Exhibition: New Works
December 8, 2019 - March 7, 2020

The Women's Art Association of Hamilton (WAAH) is our city's most enduring artist collective; they have held an annual juried show since 1896 and the AGH has been proud to host it every year since 1947.

This new exhibition will feature new works from WAAH's current and active membership. New Works: An artist is forever in the state of creating. The maceration of ideas that culminate out of inspiration is ever-present. When all criteria are met, the idea comes forth, created and birthed by the artist. New works are fresh, pure and ready for the world to behold.

In Residence: REITZENSTEIN
Vivian Maier
April 20, 2019 - March 29, 2020

REITZENSTEIN is ushering in our inaugural year-long residency program within the David Braley and Nancy Gordon Sculpture Atrium. In his art practice, he explores the relationship between technology and the natural world. An ongoing communal drawing of the inverted forest landscape will be a feature of the residency along with sculptures and installations.

Through workshops and interactive tours, participants will examine the collaboration between our non-physical consciousness and the inverted tree as a symbol of curiosity and exploration.

Milli: A Celebration of Style
Guest Curated by Nolan Bryant
April 13, 2019 - February 9, 2020

In Milli: A Celebration of Style, ensembles that span trailblazing fashion retailer Milli Gould's first half-century in business are exhibited in conversation with works from the Art Gallery of Hamilton's permanent collection. This is the first comprehensive exhibition focused on Milli and the first exhibition at the AGH to put fashion in dialogue with art.

The thematic show features nearly fifty ensembles of couture and ready-to-wear on-loan from the wardrobes of Milli's devoted clients, some dating as far back as 1964 when Mrs. Gould founded her eponymous Hamilton shop. These, along with photographs, ephemera and a recreation of the Milli atelier, highlight the business and artistry of retailing, an often overlooked aspect of the fashion industry.

Subtle evening ensembles and bold flashes of extravagance stand together as nuanced expressions of the Milli aesthetic. However it is the stories which accompany them, that help illustrate fashion as a force for change and Mrs. Gould as a quiet activist and champion of beauty who outfitted women as they took on new spaces in society.

Kim Adams: Bruegel-Bosch Bus
Permanent Installation

Repeatedly in his work, Canadian artist Kim Adams has explored the patterns of a mobile society, creating works of art that are eccentric hybrids of the readymade.

Blending humour, satire and seriousness, he builds "worlds" as a means of social critique. Adams' installations exist comfortably in the space that divides life and art. His works have been presented in two very different social worlds: in a densely social environment such as a park or street and in a museum setting like the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Neither setting is privileged.

A magnificent visual masterpiece, Bruegel-Bosch Bus consists of a 1960 Volkswagen that appears to pull a post-industrial universe displaying a cornucopia of fantastic and seductive worlds that play with our senses. This futuristic diorama is a permanent fixture in the AGH Sculpture Atrium overlooking the Irving Zucker Sculpture Garden, past Hamilton City Hall and the Niagara Escarpment.

Reminiscent of a previous installation by Adams titled Earth Wagons that presented a micro-model North American society fixed on leisure and entertainment, the Breugel-Bosch Bus encapsulates the next whole world picture, a world in which reality and unreality, logic and fantasy, banality and sublimation of existence, form an inexplicable unity.

This 'bus' is a Kubrickesque megalopolis made of icons symptomatic in present society and draws upon urban fantasies, phantasmagoric, post-apocalyptic landscapes, and a plethora of different times and cultures. Buildings from different epochs are aligned side by side and space becomes an imaginary territory where chaos prevails.
Kim Adams